[bug-sather] Successfully compiling Sather

[Guy]

This message was originally in response to the last email sent on the mailing 
list back in November of 2019 regarding a compilation issue. I realized that I 
only replied to their personal email directly and wanted to make this visible 
to anyone else who happened to come across the same problem:

Hi. I assume it is likely that your interest in this issue is long gone, as 
this reply is nearly 2 years after your original email, but just incase it 
isn’t (and to anyone who might come across this in the future)… After having 
used Ada and Pascal for awhile and appreciating their alternate syntax, I 
eventually came across Sather as a result. I realized quite soon though, that 
this language (or at least this implementation of it) had not been touched in 
quite a long time, which basically resulted in me putting it out of my mind 
completely due to the very rare chance that it would still be sanely usable in 
any form today. I also tried to compile the compiler around 4 months ago and 
was met with the same error that you had shared previously. Today, I happened 
to attempt it again for various reasons and was surprisingly able to 
successfully compile the compiler, and more importantly, use the resulting 
Sather compiler to produce a working Sather program that printed text to 
standard output.

Since GCC has changed a lot since 2007, the problem seems to be caused by it 
adding C-style multi-line comments to the System/Common/CONFIG file in the 
Sather source directory, with CONFIG being a Sather source code file itself and 
not one for C, resulting in (what seems to the bootstrap compiler?) producing 
the syntax error “expected an UID followed by a ‘:’”. I used the same, last 
stable version that you did (1.2.3), and when you reach the point of 
compilation when that error arises, open up the file it complains about in a 
text editor, and remove all of the comments surrounded by /* */. Afterwards, it 
should hopefully continue until completion (it’s not a very long compilation 
process). I’m not exactly sure what operating system you were originally trying 
to compile it on, but I was using Debian 10, with the only dependency that I 
needed to explicitly install being libgc-dev . As there doesn’t seems to be a 
make rule for installing, you can move or copy the System/, Library/, pLibrary/ 
and Bin/ directories to /usr/lib/sather (what seems to be the original 
installation path), and set the environment variable SATHER_HOME to 
/usr/lib/sather. Once you add Sather’s Bin/ path to your PATH environment 
variable, running sacomp (the main compiler) should work and produce an 
executable from a Sather source file, albeit with warnings from GCC (as Sather 
is transpiled to C first).

If anyone else comes across this, you are welcome to reply. I feel quite lucky 
for stumbling across this rather simple solution, as I really don’t have any 
experience with C, so if any more complex errors eventually arise, we may get 
stuck again. However, I would be very pleased to see this project get attention 
again, from whoever that may be, although that is probably unlikely.

Thank you to the original developers of this language and to those apart of GNU 
for keeping it’s source code and documentation available despite there being 
little to no interest for so long.